Why marry for money, when you can divorce for money? The Sunday Times Rich List has included a shiny new category for "richest divorcees", featuring women who walked away from their marriage with tens or hundreds of millions. Lawyer Ayesga Vardag commented (paywalled link): "In England today, the single easiest way for an attractive woman to make her fortune is to marry a very rich man and then divorce him a few years later, preferably after having a child."

As get-rich-quick schemes go, it's got to be easier than pretending to put a record out on Kickstarter or inventing a new brand of burrito. The only investments required are time, and your pelvic floor. And as soon as you're out of there, you can wave your enormous novelty chequebook and buy a brand new pelvic floor. Think of it as sitting through a three-hour time share presentation while on holiday. Just keep smiling through your gritted teeth, sign the release, and then it's all buffet breakfasts and free tickets to Disneyworld.

The Rich List should be a ribald read, conjuring up glorious and unlikely images of four-storey swimming pools made from Fabergé eggs and diets invented to promote gout: ("And then, Toodles took the lobster and used the butter to … insert it into the swan! Come on, you've seen Last Tango In Paris …") But it doesn't just tell us how the other half lives – it gives an insight into what motivates us all, and tells us the trends we can expect to see trickling down and influencing those of us who don't have butlers.

The inclusion of a divorce subsection is more chilling than cheerful. One of the greatest privileges of living in the free world is that many people can choose to marry their partner for love – or choose not to marry them at all. Love fades, people change and the fact that we can take legal recourse in order to be released from unhappy relationships is definitely a sign that we live in a civilised, progressive society. But that doesn't mean we can treat divorce like the ultimate cash prize in a particularly complicated gameshow – even if the "runners up" who stay married are compensated with white goods and disappointing mini-breaks.

Thanks to a series of expensive settlements for divorcees such Heather Mills, Slavica Ecclestone and Orianne Cevey, who all elected to do their post-hitch ditching in Zone 1, London is now known as the Divorce Capital of the world. This can only end in tears, tasteless souvenir T-shirts and a "Divorce experience" London Eye package in which couples can civilly unpledge their troth over mini Beef Wellingtons and mid-price Prosecco. Divorce is a sometimes necessary tragedy. It has its place, but we shouldn't be celebrating it as a logical, lucrative endgame for marriage.

There's nothing joyful or celebratory about that list of newly minted divorcees. It's a selection of short stories about heartbreak and misery. The highest settlements have been awarded to mothers divorcing fathers, which means there are quite a few children who will grow up to be more familiar with the interior of a Learjet than they are with the sound of the people who made them talking and laughing together.

The gendered nature of the list is also problematic. It's troubling in the first instance that there are so few women on the Rich List. It's scary that there is a whole section dedicated to the women who have defined their wealth – and themselves – through their relationships. If I were an ambitious, enterprising, slightly naive teenager, I'd seriously consider the pursuit of billionaire bothering, compiling Excel spreadsheets with details of the whereabouts of the wealthy. It's got to be easier than going to university, reading science and starting even the most lucrative graduate role with debts surpassing the 10K mark.

If anyone reading the Rich List is inspired to seek their fortune through time-consuming and morally shadowy activity, I would suggest that they start practising as an elite divorce lawyer. The hours are long and the exposure to human misery is unrelenting, but at least you get to go home at night and sleep in a bed that has been paid for by the unhappiness of others, and not your own.